Salads are an important part of a healthy diet, being increasingly recommended by the medical profession and by all major low-calorie diets, such a Weight Watchers, Suzanne Somers, hypoglycemic index, etc. This trend emerged as a result of the increased heart diseases and strokes, diabetes, cancer, and other life-threatening diseases, which were scientifically linked to an unhealthy diet and obesity. At the same time, the medical community and even governments of industrialized countries initiated disease prevention programs for educating the public at large in the area of healthy living and in particular healthy eating. Consequently, the popularity of the foods in the “healthy” category increases as the public awareness increases.
To address this growing trend, numerous nutritionists and food suppliers began promoting salads to individual consumers and restaurants. To stay in business, new recipes containing innovative and exotic mixtures of ingredients, often times based on ethnic preferences have been proposed. The salad dressing selection also evolved lately, and it is possible now to buy low calories dressings, spicy or sweet sauces using ethnic or proprietary recipes. As the recipes used by the food supply industry evolve to more stylish tastes, people are tempted to use ready-to-eat salads rather than preparing their own mixture.
Consumption of in advance prepared salads is increasingly popular not only for health reasons; it also saves the consumer time otherwise spend on washing the salad ingredients and preparing the dressing. In addition, if the salad includes a plurality of ingredients (leafs of lettuce, radicchio, endives, cabbage, slices of carrots, etc) often times not the entire quantity of vegetables is ingested during one serving, and the rest is lost.
Typically, salad ingredients are sold in bowl-like containers and the dressing is sold separately, in a small container. This separation provides the user with some degree of liberty in making a mixture of his/her liking, and also to keep the salad ingredients fresh for later consumption. For preparing the mixture, the user opens the salad container and the dressing container, pours the dressing in the salad container and mixes the contents.
The main disadvantage of this type of packaging for commercially available salads is that the salad bowl is generally too small to enable the user to properly mix the salad ingredients with the dressing. Also, in fast food restaurants, the salad ingredients container and the salad dressing containers/dispensers are available at different counters. Some solutions were proposed to address this problem, as described next.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,319,614 (Bolce) “Salad dressing bottle and top stopper with individual server” issued on Mar. 16, 1982 describes a salad dressing dispenser comprised of a bottle with a top cover having a suspended individual serving cup sized to hold a salad dressing serving. In order to mix the salad with the dressing, the bottle is tilted and shaken to insure proper distribution of the dressing in the individual serving cup. However, this patent is not concerned with mixing salad ingredients with the dressing, but rather with homogenizing and portioning the dressing for individual consumers.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,302,268 (Michaeli) “Salad container having insert chamber” issued on Oct. 16, 2001 describes a salad container with a removable cover adapted to receive a chamber insert with the salad dressing. The chamber projects through the cover into the container and is sealed with a removable cap. By pressing on the cap a shaft (72) is actuated to open a chamber insert, the dressing is released into the container over the salad ingredients; mixing of the salad ingredients with the dressing may be obtained by shaking the container.
The opening of the chamber insert is sometime uncertain as shaft (72) may bend under pressure and nullify the result. As well, the container of Michaeli is manufactured using a blowing method involving high costs of manufacturing.